The present invention relates generally to systems for managing patient care in a health care facility, and more particularly, to systems and methods for integrating and managing information with respect to medical care, medication delivery, asset identification, and verification of drug delivery.
Medication errors, that is, errors that occur in the ordering, dispensing and administration of medications, regardless whether those errors caused injury or not, have become a significant problem in the delivery of healthcare in the institutional setting. Additionally, adverse drug events (“ADE”), which are a subset of medication errors, defined as injuries involving a drug that require medical intervention, and representing some of the most serious medication errors, are responsible for a large number of patient injuries and death. A proportion of these errors are preventable, thus healthcare facilities continually search for ways to reduce the possible occurrence of medication errors. Various systems and methods are being developed at present to reduce the frequency of occurrence and severity of preventable adverse drug events (“PADE”) and other medication errors. In the administration of medication, focus is typically directed to the following five “rights” or factors: the right patient, the right drug, the right route, the right amount, and the right time. Systems and methods seeking to reduce ADE's and PADE's should take these five rights into consideration.
Several companies are currently marketing or will be marketing hand-held personal digital assistants (“PDA”) that are designed to provide drug administration scheduling, drug administration verification, and the electronic documentation of drug administration. These devices are predominantly used to verify administration of oral, intramuscular (“IM”), subcutaneous, and topical drugs and have limited capability in verifying the administration of IV drugs. One disadvantage of these devices is they are currently incapable of monitoring or receiving data regarding the initial and ongoing infusion parameters of an intravenous (“IV”) infusion device.
It is advantageous to have a care management system that combines all the various medication order and administration services of a healthcare facility into an integrated, automated system that checks and documents the delivery of therapeutic and other drugs to the patient. Such a system would prevent administering an inappropriate medication to a patient by checking the medication against a database of known allergic reactions and/or side-effects of the drug against the patient's medical history. The integrated system should also provide doctors, nurses, and other care-givers with updated patient information at the bedside, notify the facility's pharmacy when an additional drug is required, or when a scheduled treatment is running behind schedule, and automatically update the facility's accounting database each time a medication or other care is given.
In many hospitals and clinical laboratories, a bracelet device having the patient's identification such as his or her name printed thereon is permanently affixed to a patient upon admittance to the facility in order to identify the patient during his or her entire stay. Despite this safeguard, opportunities arise for patient identification error. For example, when a blood sample is taken from a patient, the blood sample must be identified by manually transcribing the patient's name and other information from the patient's identification bracelet. In transferring the patient's name, a nurse or technician may, instead of actually reading the patient's bracelet, miscopy the name or may rely on memory or a different data source.
Moreover, manually transferring other information such as parameters for configuring an infusion pump to dispense medication may result in errors that reduce the accuracy and/or effectiveness of drug administration and patient care. This may result in an increased duration of treatment with an attendant increase in cost.
Hospitals and other institutions continuously strive to provide quality patient care. Medical errors, such as where the wrong patient receives the wrong drug at the wrong time, in the wrong dosage, or even where the wrong surgery is performed, are a significant problem for all healthcare facilities. Many prescription drugs and injections are identified merely by slips of paper on which the patient's name and identification number have been hand-written by a nurse or technician who is to administer the treatment. For a variety of reasons, such as the transfer of patients to different beds and errors in marking the slips of paper, the possibility arises that a patient may be given an incorrect treatment. This results in increased expense for the patient and hospital that could be prevented using an automated system to verify that the patient is receiving the correct care. Various solutions to these problems have been proposed, such as systems that use bar codes to identify patients and medications, or systems allowing the beside entry of patient data. While these systems have advanced the art significantly, even more comprehensive systems could prove to be of greater value.
Delivery, verification, and control of medication in an institutional setting have traditionally been areas where errors can occur all too frequently. In a typical facility, a physician enters an order for a medication for a particular patient. This order may be handled either as a simple prescription slip, or it may be entered into an automated system, such as a physician order entry (“POE”) system. The prescription slip or the electronic prescription from the POE system is routed to the pharmacy, where the order is filled, hopefully in a timely manner, so that the medication can be provided to the patient. Typically, pharmacies check the physician order against possible allergies of the patient and for possible drug interactions in the case where two or more drugs are prescribed, and also check for contra-indications. Depending on the facility, the medication may be identified and gathered within the pharmacy and placed into a transport carrier for transport to a nurse station. Once at the nurse station, the prescriptions are once again checked against the medications that have been identified for delivery to ensure that no errors have occurred.
Typically, medications are delivered to a nurse station in a drug cart or other carrier that allows a certain degree of security to prevent theft or loss of medication. In one example, the drug cart or carrier is divided into a series of drawers or containers, each container holding the prescribed medication for a single patient. To access the medication, the nurse must enter in the appropriate identification to unlock a drawer or door or container. In other situations, inventories of commonly used drugs may be placed in a secure cabinet located in an area close by a nurse station. This inventory may contain not only topical medications but oral, IM-, and IV-delivered medications as well. Nurse identification and a medication order number are typically required to gain access to the cabinet.
The nurse station receives a listing of drugs to be delivered to patients at intervals throughout the day. A nurse or other care-giver or other qualified person reads the list of medications to be delivered, and gathers those medications from the inventory at the nurse station. Once all of the medications have been gathered for the patients in the unit for which the nurse station is responsible, one or more nurses then take the medications to the individual patients and administer the dosages.
Common to all of these systems is the nurse or other care-giver who delivers the medication. The nurse or care-giver is central to the process of verifying that the right medication is given to the right patient in the correct dosage at the right time at the point of care. No other person in the facility is situated as well as the nurse or other care-giver delivering the medication to ensure or verify that the appropriate drug is being given to the appropriate patient.
Such a system works well to verify that patients are receiving the appropriate drug when drugs are delivered orally, but the system may not be capable of thoroughly verifying that the appropriate medication regimen is being delivered to a patient in the case where IV drugs are being delivered. For example, a nurse or other care-giver may carry an IV bag down to a particular patient area, hang the bag, program an infusion pump with appropriate treatment parameters and begin infusion of the medication. The applicable hospital control system, such as the pharmacy information system, may not know that the patient has received the medication, and if the information is lost somewhere, the possibility exists of medicating the patient twice. Thus, there may be a break in the link of verification that the medication is being properly delivered to the patient if an event occurs resulting in a deviation from the desired treatment parameters.
Hence what has been recognized as a need, and has heretofore been unavailable, is an integrated, modular system for tracking and controlling patient care and for integrating the patient care information with other institutional databases to achieve a reliable, efficient, cost-effective delivery of healthcare to patients. The invention fulfills this need and others.